


i will read all their dreams to the stars

by thermodynamicActivity (chlorinetrifluoride)



Series: The Collegestuck 'Verse [41]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Depression, F/M, Humanstuck, Pocstuck, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-23
Updated: 2014-12-23
Packaged: 2018-03-03 02:20:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2834606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chlorinetrifluoride/pseuds/thermodynamicActivity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>you, sollux, have been acquainted with the night, to the point where you have memorized the density of its melancholy. but aradia has not, until now. she has never known this absolute darkness, this murky lassitude. when it paralyzes her, she cries and she shakes and prays for a pharmacological salvation that doesn’t come. she begins to fade before your eyes, until the person who she once was seems more like dream to you than a memory. and you, you are useless. you cannot absorb her depression into your own marrow. all you can do is sit with her and wait for morning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i will read all their dreams to the stars

**Author's Note:**

> yet another fic in the collegestuck verse.  
> aradia vs clinical depression, with a boyfriend who empathizes but cannot do much else.

_"The stars, too, they tell of spring returning. And summer with another wind that no one yet has known…"_  - Spring Awakening

You hate rummaging through her things when she isn’t around, because she trusts you enough to have given you a duplicate key to her dorm room and you’d never want to break that trust, but she’s gone to class and you can’t find the teabags. Your head pounds, blurring your already shitty vision, feeling as if someone’s beating at the inside of your skull with a giant percussion mallet.

No teabags there either.

While the water boils on the stovetop, you open yet another cabinet in the kitchen and start yanking everything out, far past the point of giving a shit about keeping things in order. You’ll fix it all when the pain in your head is something lower than a thirteen out of ten.

Aradia always makes you this strong, heady tea for your migraines, and it works better than everything else you’ve tried, including fioricet. Leave it to her to figure out how to make you better, time after time. Aradia has this knack for fixing you. You could live a thousand lifetimes and never be able to repay her.

Crammed into the back of the cabinet, past all the spices, cans of tuna fish, and instant ramen, you finally find the teabags in a small cardboard box, along with a single medication bottle.

You assume it’s one of yours, a bottle of meds you brought to her place once and forgot about. You hold it up to the light so you can read the label. If it’s a bottle of Effexor, you don’t have to drag your ass to the pharmacy to get your refill until next week.

But that isn’t the case. It’s not even your name on the prescription.

_Megido, Aradia_  
_**Escitalopram oxalate 20 mg** _  
_**Generic for Lexapro** _  
_Refills: 2_  
_Date filled: 10/04/13_

You’re so shocked that you nearly drop the bottle.

Then everything about the way she’s been acting this semester starts to make sense.

Her reticence. Her lethargy. The way she’s turned into a walking shadow of her old self, locking herself in her room for days on end. Maybe that wasn’t just junior year stress, the way she’d insisted.

Along with textbooks, the skulls of small animals that she’s recovered on digs line her bookcases. They have always lined her bookcases, and they’ve never unnerved you. They were endearing in the same way she is, the bones an integral part of who she is as a person.

Now, now, they seem to be looking at you, glaring even. Judging you for having not seen the signs. Even though she credit overloads more semesters than not, her average credit load somewhere around 21, Aradia always finds time to check up on you.

But you… you have clearly not been paying attention for quite some time.

A key turns in the lock, the door swings open, and Aradia walks into her living room, humming and looking happy for probably the first time this month.

"I got a hundred and seven on my A&P exam," she calls. She shrugs off her red jacket and drapes it over a chair.

However, this smile melts off her face once she notices what you hold in your left hand. She blinks at you, swallows, and then drops her eyes to the floor. You adjust your glasses and try to hate yourself less.  
  
"Were you hiding this?" you ask, finally.  
  
She nods.

"Why?"

"I didn’t want you to worry." She plucks the bottle from your hand and stuffs it into the pocket of her wool skirt. "You have enough going on without having to concern yourself over me."

Her fingers tap the counter nervously.”Besides.”

"Besides?"

"I thought you might judge me, or something."

You put a hand on each of her shoulders, fix her in your gaze.

"Why would I judge you for something like this? I mean, look at me."

She still won’t meet your gaze. Sadly, she shakes her head..

"I’m supposed to be the one who has it together,” she explains. “And anyway, there’s no reason for me to be like this. Everything in my life is going just fine. I’m in the honors program and I’m set to graduate a semester early. I have a job I like, a major that I love, and someone who loves me unconditionally. "

She balls up one of her fists in frustration, unclenches it, puts her head in her hands. “And it’s like this almost all the time, these feelings. Like, even if I could move, I wouldn’t want to. I barely eat. I barely sleep. I have to force myself to go to class, and sometimes I can’t even do that.”

Your arms tighten around her, and you realize, feeling her shake in your grasp, that she’s begun to cry. You rock her back and forth and let her cry herself out, petting her hair and occasionally whispering shooshing noises.

"Sometimes there isn’t a reason," you whisper against her hair. “There doesn’t always have to be a reason. That’s okay.”

When she’s steadier on her feet, she makes dinner. Salad, with artichoke hearts and ginger dressing. She notices the way you hold your head in your hands and immediately apologizes for not making you a cup of tea as soon as she got in.

“It’s all good,” you say, as she places the mug of tea down on the table in front of you. The first sip makes you smile. The second leaches the tension from your bones. Halfway through the cup, you still have a headache, but it’s more of a faint twinge than the previous pounding wail. Once you’ve drained your first cup, she pours you another.

“I keep telling you that you need to get more sleep,” she says. You roll your eyes.

You two do your homework in relative silence, the only sound coming from the rooms next door, and the radio in Aradia’s kitchen, which is always set to play classical music. But, staring at her, you remember the question you’d meant to ask before dinner.

“How long?”

The keys of her laptop stop clacking and she looks up from its screen. “How long what?”

“How long have you been depressed?”

At the way she inhales sharply, glances around, and finally elects to stare at your feet, you add, “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“No, no, it’s fine, Sollux.” She waves her hand. “I guess I haven’t felt right since August. Originally, I thought I was just tired, but apparently not.”

“I see.”

“You know Roxy Lalonde right? She sits next to me in Anatomy lecture. After I missed a bunch of classes, she asked me what’d happened, and I told her how I’d been feeling,” Aradia explains. “Then, she ended up talking to Jade, y’know, her old roommate, the pre-med one, and Jade suggested I go to the mental health center. My doctor there, he ended up putting me on medication. That was in like… mid-September?”

“Oh.”

“Jade says that the type of drug I’m on can take up to six to eight weeks to start working, ‘cause of something to do with the blood-brain barrier. And since Jade knows everything, I figure she’s right,” Aradia says, sipping at her glass of water. A faint darkness clouds her expression, then. “But I don’t even feel a little better yet, no change whatsoever. So I’m scared, honestly.”

You’re feeling a million things right now, so you decide that it’s best if you don’t talk. You give her a look that you hope she interprets as empathy, but you’re probably too pissed to pull it off.

Aradia sighs, and bites down on her lower lip. “You’re angry at me for not telling you.”

But out of all the emotions coursing through you at that moment, that isn’t one of them. You couldn’t be angry at her, particularly about something like this. You’re sad that she said nothing, but you know all too well how depression forces people to turn inward.

“I’m angry,” you admit. “But not at you. I’m angry that I can’t do anything to magically make you better. I’m angry that I didn’t notice that you weren’t alright for two fucking months because all I’ve been doing is locking myself in the computer lab. So now I have to ask myself, what kind of godawful boyfriend am I?”

Way to make everything about you, Sollux Captor. You will never ever deserve this woman.

She scoots across the couch over to you, curls up in your lap and makes herself comfortable, resting her head against the bony jut of your clavicle.

“You’re not awful, Sollux,” she murmurs. “You’re a self-loathing jackass sometimes, but you’re not awful. You’re the best boyfriend I’ve ever had.”

You briefly think back through the years, from middle school up until this point.

“I’m the only boyfriend you’ve ever had.”

Another rare smile from her. “So then, I was lucky enough to choose right my first time out.”

You love her so much that sometimes it hurts to contemplate, and you’ve dated other people, sure, but never quite felt that way with them.

There was Eridan, and your recreational drug-fueled relationship of mutually assured self destruction, which lasted longer than anyone thought it would (thirteen weeks). Eridan wasn’t a bad person, exactly, but he reminded you of a fire. Capable of warming, but just as capable of burning. And he clung to you reflexively, like a drowning man holding for dear life onto a piece of driftwood, as if you could somehow save him through sheer proximity. But you could barely save yourself back then, let alone a self-destructive junkie. You can still barely save yourself.

There was Roxy, who had self-destructive tendencies a bit like Eridan’s, but was capable of keeping a lid on them. You began dating her because she was one of the few who could challenge you intellectually - you were valedictorian of your high school graduating class and she was salutatorian. Apparently, your averages were identical, but they chose you as number one because “Captor” came before “Lalonde” in the alphabet, and because Roxy had made the mistake of calling the Condesce a tyrant bitch while she was standing right behind her. As lovers, you and Roxy fought constantly, your relationship more volatile than potassium in water. As friends, you have an ongoing platonic rivalry and continue to care about each other.

There was Feferi, whom you continue to love, but in a different way. She was delightful and ebullient and kind to everyone, and was definitely too good for you. She attacked the walls of your self-loathing with unconditional love. She managed to drag you out of your room when few others could. She devised fish puns as pet names to call you, like “sole-lux” and “silly fish”. But as much as you adored her, her constant vivacity could run you ragged. When you isolated yourself, she assumed you were depressed instead of simply trying to recharge, and dragged you out to socialize accordingly. You two are better suited the way you are now, as friends with benefits.

Aradia, though. Your first memory of her is of a demure fifth grader with plaited hair, a red headband, slanted, almond-shaped eyes, and an obsession with paleontology. She never mocked your lisp. She sang alto in the school's chorus and smiled at you when you passed her in the hallway. After you became friends, you’d daydream about hacking the school’s computers, and she’d dig holes next to you in the schoolyard grass, hoping to find fossils. You and she became known as “those two kids”, always in each other’s presence. You remember the day in eighth grade that she stopped wearing her hair in a long braid. Pinned it up into a bun, and began wearing it beneath a headscarf.

It was a religious thing.

In high school, she filled out nicely, causing many a boy (and Roxy) to ask her out. She turned them all down politely but firmly. You assumed she was too focused on school to entertain the idea of dating. You were wrong.

For Valentine’s day sophomore year, you bought a chocolate rose and gave it to her during english, reciting to her a poem that Karkat had helped you write. Nervous as hell, your lisp was all over the place, and you’re fairly sure you mangled your grand recitation. But Aradia’s smile could have lit up Times Square. On the bus home, she kissed you, and you committed the cinnamon-spice smell that followed her around to memory.

At fifteen, you’d been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, told Karkat the day you found out, but waited a week to tell Aradia. You expected her to distance herself from the mercurial madman and wouldn’t blame her if she did. Instead, she showed up for school the next day with a stack of books about the topic, most of them dense and college-level at the very least.

“I want to learn everything that I can about it,” she said while she highlighted certain lines in the DSM-IV-TR.

In eleventh grade, you two had no classes or frees in common. Over the summer, she and her parents had moved, meaning that you two were no longer even on the same bus route. So you took the train home together, discussed your days, and held hands.

You had a nervous breakdown halfway through junior year, went psychotic, tried to kill yourself, and ended up hospitalized in the adolescent psychiatric ward. Mituna came to visit you a few times a week. He brought you clothes to wear and books to read, mostly programming stuff from his college days. Aradia put the fake ID she’d bought from Dave to good use in order to convince the orderlies that she was actually eighteen.

Along with your homework assignments, which she’d gotten from Roxy who had four classes with you, she brought you a get well card from Karkat - which began: “YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE” - and a tin of sour gummy worms. For nineteen days, she came every evening for visiting hours. Shit, she came more often than your parents did.

When you got discharged, you tried to break up with her, because you’d sooner be without her than hurt her ever again. She refused. For the next five years, you tried this every time you came down from your overly-symptomatic states. And each time, she refused.

“There are worse things than being crazy,” she’d tell you.

She spent summer breaks at camps across the country, learning more about archeology and anthropology, coming home tanned with a smile on her face, a head full of jargon, and more animal skulls to decorate her bookases.

For your part, you just stayed up all night coding and sleeping in until 3 PM.

You two didn’t have the sort of relationship where you made out in the hallways and walked around with your hands in each other’s back pockets. It was different. More subtle. But no less serious. Mituna, your brother, four years your senior, told you that nobody knew what love was at seventeen.

But you did, you were sure of it.

For you, love stood at 64 inches tall, possessed Korean and Iranian heritage, drank entirely too much tea, couldn’t differentiate between “your” and “you’re”, texted you thrice a day to remind you to take your medication, sang with an astounding mezzo range, had terrible penmanship, fell asleep in her 9th period precalculus class religiously, and left crane-shaped notes in your locker that, when unfolded, read things like, “I have debate every day this week except Thursday, so let’s go to the movies then,” and, “Sollux, I love you.”

You took her to junior prom, and had to stop staring at her for long enough to dance with people.

On your 17th birthday, Aradia called you at some unholy hour of the morning, and informed you that she’d been reading about the law. You stared at the phone incredulously, and asked if this was Terezi calling from Aradia’s phone, which it wasn’t. Apparently, Aradia had been looking up the legal age of consent for sex in New York State, which turned out to be seventeen.

“Nobody in my house is home,” she’d mentioned coyly.

You practically ran over there.

You spent the summer of 2010 in equal probability bent over college brochures at your desk or bent over the back of Aradia on your bed. Sunday mornings and the sun shining in strips through the slitted windowpanes of your room. Aradia, sitting at your desk, typing up a draft for her college essay on your computer. She stood to stretch, wearing nothing but one of your gray button down shirts and a pair of red cotton panties.

Strange, how self conscious she had been the first time she stood before you wearing nothing. The first time you ever saw her poise crack. She crossed her arms across her breasts, eyebrows knit together nervously. She’d forgotten to shave. There were stretch marks on her thighs and sides. Her hips were too wide. She wasn’t proportional. She turned her face away from you, and you knew that look. That feeling of inadequacy.

Shit, the only reason why you weren’t doing the same exact thing was because you were too focused on her to be scared shitless for yourself.

You cupped her cheek with your hand until she finally met your gaze.

“You’re beautiful,” you told her.

“You too,” she said.

You learned her body, found out what made her toes curl, what made her moan, what made her whisper incoherent obscene things into your ear, what made her scream so loudly that you had to glance at the door to make sure nobody had heard.

Sometimes, you fucked it up. So did she. It worked out in the end, though.

With streaks of sweat rolling down her temple, she lay against you on the bed, heavy but not crushing. Her hair tickled your shoulder. She reached over to your nightstand to retrieve your glasses, watching as you pushed them back onto your face and closed your eyes.

You’re not sure when she’d begun to sing, but she did, gazing at you all the while.  _“..midas is king and he holds me so tight, and he turns me to gold in the sunlight…”_

Like all good things, the summer ended, and senior year descended upon all of you with the mercy of a firestorm.

When you had your breakdowns, she came by with tea and reassurance, cradling your head in her arms and trying to sing the insanity out of you. If you focused on her voice, the other voices became less intense.

At some point, she too became overwhelmed and depressed by the sheer amount of work she had to do for her classes, for debate, and for college apps. Her first episode of depression hit her, but with lethargy and anhedonia instead of suicidality.

Her grades stayed stable, though,

When you brought it up, she insisted she was fine. Just fine. By second semester, it was as if her bout with melancholy had never happened. You figured it was a one-off occurrence, something that would never happen again.

You were wrong. This semester is proof, for watching fall progress is like watching Aradia dwindle away like the hours of sunlight in each day.

You wouldn’t wish major depression on anyone, but least of all on her, the woman with the long curly hair, the affinity for skeletal structures, and perfect pitch, the one who’s been your friend for ten years and your girlfriend for five.

The most frustrating part of everything is knowing there’s nothing you can do. There are no words to will it away, no magic bullet.

You know what it is to go through the motions while you’re drowning, to cling to your routines desperately, hoping that they’ll suddenly mean something again. To wander greyscale in a technicolor world. So watching her endure it for herself is its own agonizing circle of hell.

You text her twice a day to remind her to eat. Some days she goes to class. Some days she doesn’t. She struggles through assignments based on lectures she never attended. She leaves areas of her exams blank.

Her eyes are red-rimmed even when she isn’t wearing eyeliner.

She tells you about how she’s beginning to think that happiness is a delusion, how she dreams of endings, how this world is a nothing place.

You tell her to take her medication, explain to her that she’ll feel differently eventually. But when the darkness deepens, she stops sleeping altogether, walking campus like a ghost.

Half the time she forgets what day it is.

She rests fitfully in your arms, never quite drifting into somnolence. You brush tendrils of hair out of her eyes. When she does pass out, it’s for no more than half an hour at a time.

Even so, she manages to hide her state of mind from everyone who isn’t you. The few people who realize to varying degrees that all is not the way it should be - Tavros, Equius, Roxy, Jade, Nepeta - Aradia pushes them all away.

She plasters on a false face to greet the world, taking pains each morning to make sure that her makeup is perfect and her smile is airtight. You think of a verse from a poem you had to analyze for class a month ago -  _“There will be time, there will be time / to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet…”_

Primer, foundation, red eyeliner, mascara, lip pencil, lipstick…

She drops her deceptive vivacity the moment she returns to her room. She tries the disguise with you, but you’ve been made slave to your cycles of ecstasy and desolation enough times that you know what faking normality when you’re dying inside looks like.

"You don’t have to pretend in front of me," you tell her. But pretense has become a way of life. Still, sometimes she’s too tired to put on the mask, and eventually she lets it drop around you altogether.

There are some things she can’t conceal as well. How easily she forgets the simplest thing. Eyes that never seem to focus and look perpetually lost.

There are periods where she sits in bed with the lights off for days at a time, only bothering to let you in after you’ve banged on her door for five straight minutes. You could just unlock it, but that wouldn’t be right.

"It can’t be fun dealing with me in this state," she says one night after you make dinner for her. Calling it dinner is a loose term. Your cooking skills end at the ability to boil water, so it’s just a bowl of instant ramen.

You shrug. “You’ve been dealing with me for years, so I mean… this is the least I can do.”

Some nights you come over and she throws you out, because she can barely deal with herself, let alone anyone else.

When she isn’t fully asocial, you bring over Indiana Jones movies to cheer her up. Occasionally it works, and she smiles in spite of herself. But those moments are few and far between, rarer as the weeks wear on.

She tries to initiate sex every so often to make you happy, to try to pretend things are normal, but it’s clear she isn’t into it, and you’re not going to push her. Occasionally you two kiss and grope, but that’s about it.

And she’s always distant.

There’s a wall between her and the rest of the world, one you can barely scale. Once in a while, you can throw messages over it, but that’s it.

The temperature drops.

Nothing changes.

_AA: what d0 y0u d0 when y0ur medicati0ns arent w0rking_  
_TA: get on new one2_  
_TA: took me ten med 2wiitche2 two get where ii am._

All they do is increase the dosage of the ones she’s on.

She sleeps even less. Her memory gets worse. Her moods swing wildly.  
She can’t conceal her emotional state well, but since it’s only a few weeks until finals, everyone’s in varying states of nervous breakdown mode.

She reads the same page in her textbook over and over, still unable to understand.

She hits you up at unholy hours. She spends her days in class operating on autopilot, and her evenings ruminating, existence turned into a waking nightmare.

_AA: i want t0 die._  
_AA: i want t0 die and my d0ct0r won’t listen t0 me._  
_AA: i beg and plead and all i get is the same thing at a different d0se._

You want to help her and you can’t, so you stay up almost round the clock, at least determined to be awake when she messages you. Mind stretched to its breaking point, your thoughts begin to speed up maybe eight days before your first final exam.

And suddenly, you don’t have to sleep.

You don’t even want to.

You jump from one concept to the next, constantly moving. People speak even when your room is empty, telling you to do all sorts of things. Sometimes you can’t hear what they’re saying, because they’re all giving you instructions in unison.

Over the course of four days you end up having sex with six people, only two of whom you actually know.

Your mind is a cacophony of light and sound, relentless in its intensity.

Feeling something like a string pulled taut, you pace the streets until you find your way to Gray and spend six hours talking Roxy’s ear off.

You can do anything. You are everything.

You speak to empty crowds and respond to invisible voices while tipsy eyes regard you with abject confusion.

Aradia comes to collect you in the morning, having marched across a snowed-in campus in nothing but a night-gown, a bathrobe, and boots.

She’s been crying. She tells you that she’s been out looking for you since Thursday. It’s now Saturday.

Roxy takes a good look at her, tells her that she looks a lot like a zombie, and asks her if things are alright with her, but she waves the concern off.

You yell at Aradia all the way back to her dorm, angry that she can’t understand anything that you’re trying to tell her.

After dragging you to the medical center and explaining to your psychiatrist that your medications aren’t working, she watches you like a hawk while the dosage increase suffuses through your system. For three days she only leaves your side to take her final exams.

You take your own in a fog, rendered undead by haloperidol and clozapine.

Once your mind clocks down and slows to its normal pace, the first thing you do is go back to her place to apologize profusely for the last few days, and to beg her to break up with you, to set herself free once and for all.

She forgives you, but refuses to break up with you.

You continue to hate yourself.

After exams are over, while everyone else parties and celebrates, Aradia takes to her bed. She says she’s waiting for grades to come out. She’s mostly idle on pesterchum, electing instead to cocoon herself in her blankets and stare at the four walls.

"Go out," she says to you. "Don’t stay here in the dark on my account."

So you obey her reluctantly, but not for very long. Everything seems wrong without her in tow.

You return to her room with a slice of cake for her from Roxy’s party, unlocking the door with one hand. Aradia has moved from the bed since you last saw her.

Dressed only in her underwear, she sits at her computer desk, head on its wooden surface, crying silently.

There’s only one window open on her laptop. You scan its black text.

_ANTH 381: C_  
_ANTH 307: C_  
_ANTH 350: C_  
_ENGL 202: F_  
_BIOL 250: A_  
_SEM GPA: 2.07_

She murmurs the words “hopeless” and “failure” and doesn’t bother to look up, even when you place a hand on her head. At some point, she stops crying and just stares blankly into space.

"When does it get better?" she asks in complete monotone.

You’re really not sure and you don’t want to lie to her. The least she deserves from you is the truth.

So you make her a cup of tea. You can’t really do anything else. You kick yourself because you can’t do anything else. You want to do nothing more than absorb her misery, to chase the melancholy from her mind even if it will assail your own in recompense.

She swallows her medication each morning like someone praying to a god they no longer believe in, and you silently beg for something to give.

She’s managed to hang onto her seat in the national honor society despite her lackluster fall 2013 grades, but not even that piece of news rouses much of a reaction from her.

"Just watch me fuck up spring too," she says.

It snows again that weekend.

People build snowmen outside, drink hot chocolate, and plan out their impending vacation time. She glances out the window every so often, utterly disinterested. You try to get her to come out with you.

"Maybe it’ll cheer you up," you tell her. She shrugs and turns away.

"I can’t. I feel too strange around other people," she says.

"How so?"

"Like I’m some kind of alien. Because they can laugh, and I can’t."

And that’s the end of that conversation.

She drops her course for the winter semester because there’s no way she’ll pass it, but elects to stay on campus over break. She doesn’t want to go home and inflict her presence on the people she’s related to.

You’re also staying, partially because you can’t stand your family, and partially because you’re taking a winter class. Karkat, Eridan, John, Gamzee and Dave all move out, leaving you alone in the suite.

There’s nothing to do.

So even if Aradia doesn’t want to see anyone, you go over to Dozo each day to make sure she’s still there.

It’s been four and a half months since the last time she felt okay.

Over dinner that you’ve grabbed from Wendy’s, Aradia tells you that she’s thinking of checking herself into the hospital. You nod, agreeing with this decision.

If the doctors decide to hold onto her, you’ll visit every day. You’ll bring her food each evening, even if you can’t cook. You’ll… teach yourself how, or something.

On pesterchum that night, you tell her about how things run on the inpatient unit, what she’ll be allowed to have, what they’ll keep in sharps, and what they’ll send home. You’ve been hospitalized five times since you were fifteen, so you’re something of an expert. She makes you promise not to tell any of your friends. You do, and tell her not to be afraid.

"They’ll be able to fix you," you say. "They’ll figure out the right stuff."

She leaves her room for the first time since finals on the 19th, bound for the medical center. You wait for the call from psych but don’t wait too hard. Once, you were in the ER for 60 hours before they found you a bed on an inpatient unit.

What you don’t expect is for her to message you, seventeen hours after she left. You answer the text anyway, surprised.

_AA: they sent me h0me_  
_AA: since i am n0t a danger t0 myself 0r anyone else_  
_TA: diid you tell them about the 2uiiciidal thought2_  
_AA: yes_  
_AA: they asked me t0 rate their intensity_  
_AA: and t0 tell them h0nestly if i w0uld act 0n them_  
_AA: i said n0 to the sec0nd thing_  
_TA: well that part ii2 good two hear_  
_AA: they said that if anything changes i sh0uld c0me back_  
_TA: diid you ju2t get home?_  
_AA: five minutes ag0 actually_  
_AA: 0h yeah_  
_AA: theyre tapering me 0ff lexapr0_  
_AA: everythings been switched ar0und med wise_  
_AA: so i signed 0n t0 ask y0u what y0u knew about remer0n, pristiq, and/0r kl0n0pin_  
_TA: are those your new mediicatiion2?_  
_AA: yes_  
_TA: iive never really heard of prii2tiiq but both remeron and klonopiin knock you on your a22 and ii know that from experiience_  
_AA: makes sense_  
_AA: im supp0sed t0 take th0se tw0 bef0re i g0 t0 bed_  
_TA: iif you want me two, ii can come over_  
_AA: 0kay_  
_AA: sure_  
_AA: why n0t_

She takes the mirtazapine and the clonazepam at a quarter to nine, and for the first time in what seems like forever, sleeps the whole night through.

At eleven the next morning, she’s still out like a light. You decide not to wake her.

Finally, sometime in the late afternoon, her eyes flutter open. You’ve been holding her since she fell asleep. She blinks up at you in vague confusion and yawns.

"What time is it?"

She stretches her arms up toward the ceiling.

You look at your phone. “Four. PM, I mean.”

"How long have I been out?"

"Since ten."

She nods, rolls over and goes back to sleep. She spends the better part of 48 hours unconscious, making up for lost time.

When she wakes up, she’s still sad, but her thoughts don’t seem to be as bleak.

"My head feels clearer," she tells you. You’re glad to hear it.  
  
Even though it’s evening when she finally gets out of bed for more than twenty minutes, she makes breakfast - pancakes and sausage. It’s been ages since she’s had the energy to cook anything, so her skills are a bit rusty. It’s still worlds better than anything you can make.

The week goes on. You Skype with your parents to assuage some of their anger at your absence.

For Christmas, you give Aradia a book about the excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb. She gives you a scarf that she’s crocheted for you. It’s dark brown and bee-patterned.

You stroll around the deserted campus arm-in-arm like the last two people on earth. It’s snowing again, about three inches on the ground and more falling fast.

Some of it sticks to her eyelashes. She catches flakes of it on her tongue.

You take a few sips from your thermos of tea. She adores the snow. You won’t interrupt her even if you are freezing your nuts off.

After about an hour of wandering, you two find yourselves back at Roth. You make a beeline for your car, start the engine and switch on the heat. She sits next to you, in the front passenger’s seat, and turns on the radio. It’s playing Christmas music. While you look out the window at the empty streets, Silent Night begins to play.

When you glance over at her, she’s singing. Singing, smiling, and swaying gently in her seat with her eyes shut.

_"Round young virgin… mother and child…"_

She opens her eyes then. At your shocked stare, her smile widens. She continues to sing.

_"Holy infant, so tender and mild…"_

She clasps your fingertips in one gloved hand.

_"Sleep in heavenly peace…"_

You’re lost for words, so you just gaze at her in awe, as if you’ve never seen her like this before.

_"Sleep in heavenly peace…"_

If you could, you would stop time right now. Freeze everything at this moment and stay here, drinking in the sight of Aradia holding that last note and smiling softly, as the snow falls in lazy circles around you.

Even though you know it doesn’t work that way, you hope that her recovery will be straight-line.

But on the 31st, she doesn’t get out of bed.

The idea of happy new year then seems more like a taunt than anything else. You two toast to 2014 at midnight, but her smile is hollow. At one, she stares despondently at her calendar.

"If I still feel like this next year, I’m jumping off the roof."

She pours herself another glass of champagne.

On january fifth, she informs you on pesterchum that she’s made dinner and invites you over.

She’s trying.

The month goes on and her moods continue to oscillate between baseline and hopelessness.

But the scale tips and the periods of normality win out. She starts reading again, losing herself in the library for hours at a time. She invites Tavros over to play video games.

She regards the world with wonder, everything around her imbued with sudden meaning again. One week, she pushes herself to go outside every single day, and does.

On an evening toward the end of January, she messages you.

_AA: hey s0llux_  
_AA: y0u sh0uld pr0bably c0me 0ver_  
_AA: 0u0_

Really, you should be studying for linalg, but fuck that.

You knock, and she opens her door, quickly pulling you into her room. Pupils blown wide, she’s wearing nothing but a mischievous grin and the lingerie you got her for her last birthday. Your mouth goes dry.

You’ve missed this. You’ve missed her.

When people start coming back to campus, when her friends text her and tell her that they’re on the train, she’s at the station to greet them. She listens to Karkat bitch about the LIRR and laughs.

Each morning before she leaves for class, she sings along to the radio while she goes about her daily routine. The times you don’t stay over, she texts you and reminds you to take your medication.

If there are moments where she can’t get out of bed, you know that they’ll pass soon enough. You bring dinner and sit with her on her bed in silence, waiting for life to return.

And it does.

It always does.


End file.
